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<center><b><font size="+2">retawq Documentation</font><br><font
size="+1">Sessions</font></b></center>

<p><a name="intro"></a><b>Introduction</b></p>

<p>A <i>session</i> is information about the current state of retawq. More
precisely, it is information about all "virtual windows" which are currently
open and about the documents which are shown in the views of each window.</p>

<p>You can save this information at any time into an arbitrary local file with
the <a href="key.html">keyboard command</a> "S". Once you have saved the
session, you can resume it at any later time, even after the program was quit
and restarted. This allows you to get quickly back to where you were.</p>

<p>To resume a session when you start the program, you can use the <a
href="arg.html">command-line option</a> "--resume-session". To resume a session
while the program is running, use the <a href="key.html">keyboard command</a>
"M"; in this case, the current state is not "lost", it is only supplemented by
the resumed session. Resuming from a session file does not remove or modify the
file, so you can resume from the same file again and again.</p>

<p><a name="problem"></a><b>Problems</b></p>

<p>When you save a session, not <i>all</i> state information is saved, because
that would result in very big, complicated files. (Simpler files have the
advantage that you can create or edit them by hand, if you want to; cf. the
file format description below.) The following problems can occur; they mostly
concern very rare conditions, so they shouldn't cause much trouble in
practice.</p>

<ul>
<li>When a document was the result of an HTTP "post" operation, you won't get
it when resuming, mostly for the following reasons: 1. the post-data (which
might be very large) isn't stored in a session file; 2. the "post" method is
often used for tasks like adding a record to a database, and adding a record
twice normally isn't a good idea.</li>
<li>All of your changes in resumed HTML forms are lost, so you might e.g. have
to re-enter texts.</li>
<li>When you resume a session which contained many non-local documents (e.g.
from HTTP URLs), a "download storm" will break loose. This is because retawq
doesn't yet have a disk cache and must receive all the non-local documents
again.</li>
</ul>

<p><a name="format"></a><b>File Format</b></p>

<p>A session file consists of a series of text lines:</p>

<ul>
<li>A line beginning with a "#" character is a comment line and ignored.</li>
<li>A line beginning with "W:" marks the creation of a new virtual window; any
subsequent "U:" lines open documents in new views within that window until the
next "W:" occurs. If this line contains a "v" part with a number 0 or 1, this
means it's the currently visible window with that number.</li>
<li>A line beginning with "U:" opens a URL in a new view in the current window.
The line consists of several descriptive parts; all parts besides the URL are
optional. Each part begins with the character sequence "|#|", followed by a
lowercase letter and a ":"; the letters have the following meaning:
<ul>
<li>u: the URL of the document</li>
<li>f: special flags; in this part, an "h" means "enforce HTML" (cf. the <a
href="key.html">keyboard command</a> "H"); an "s" shows the document as source
code, even if it would normally be interpreted as HTML; a "c" means that this
URL is the "current" one in the window, that is, the one which is shown when
the window is visible</li>
<li>l: a line number, indicating how far you had scrolled down in the document;
not yet used</li>
<li>w: the width of the view; not yet used</li>
<li>h: a title for a document which is not interpreted as HTML (if a document
is interpreted as HTML, the title is taken from the HTML &lt;title&gt;
tag)</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>

<p>If this format seems too complicated, just save a session and read the
resulting file - it's really simple. :-)</p>

<p><hr>This documentation file is part of version 0.2.6c of <a
href="http://retawq.sourceforge.net/">retawq</a>, a network client created by
<span lang="de">Arne Thoma&szlig;en</span>. retawq is basically released under
certain versions of the GNU General Public License and WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.
Copyright (C) 2001-2006 <a href="mailto:arne@arne-thomassen.de"><span
lang="de">Arne Thoma&szlig;en</span></a>.</p>
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